"Manhood at last!-and with its consciousness
Are strength and freedom."
GEORGE COOLIDGE,
13 TREMONT ROW.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1860,
BY GEORGE COOLIDGE,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.
Electrotyped at the
BOSTON STEREOTYPE FOUNDRY.
Damrell & Moore, Printers, Boston.
MATURER Manhood now arrives,
And other thoughts come on;
But with the baseless hopes of youth,
Its generous warmth is gone;
Cold, calculating cares succeed
The timid thought, the wary deed,
The full realities of truth;
Back on the past he turns his eye,
Remembering, with an envious sigh,
The happy dreams of Youth.
Manhood at last! - and, with its consciousness,
Are strength and freedom; freedom to pursue
The purposes of Hope - the godlike bliss
Born in the struggle for the good and true!
And every energy that should be mine,
This day I dedicate to its object, - Life!
So help me Heaven, that never I resign
The duty which devotes me to the strife.
"Adam, the goodliest man of men since born
His sons
the fairest of her daughters, Eve."
GODLIKE erect, with native honor clad,
In naked majesty, seemed lord of all,
And worthy seemed; for in his looks divine
The image of his glorious Maker shone;
His fair large front and eye sublime declared
Absolute rule; and hyacinthine locks
Round from his parted forelock manly hung
Clustering, but not beneath his shoulders broad.
SEE, what a grace was seated on his brow!
Hyperion's curls;
The front of Jove himself;
An eye like Mars to threaten and command;
A station like the herald Mercury,
New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill;
A combination, and a form, indeed,
Where every god did seem to set his seal,
To give the world assurance of a man.
I SAW one man, armed simply with God's Word,
Enter the souls of many fellow-men,
And pierce them sharply as a two-edged sword,
While conscience echoed back his words again;
Till, even as showers of fertilizing rain
Sink through the bosom of the valley clod,
So their hearts opened to the wholesome pain,
And hundreds knelt upon the flowery sod,
One good man's earnest prayer the link 'twixt
them and God.
That amphitheatre of awe-struck heads
Is still before me: there the mother bows, And o'er her slumbering infant meekly sheds Unusual tears. There, knitting his dark brows, The penitent blasphemer utters vows Of holy import. There, the kindly man, Whose one weak vice went near to bid him lose All he most valued when his life began, Abjures the evil course which first he blindly ran.
There, with pale eyelids heavily weighed down
By a new sense of overcoming shame,
A youthful Magdalene, whose arm is thrown
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